Increasingly, it seems, the first fact of academia is this: higher education is a hyper-competitive industry. Scientists compete for federal research dollars, humanities professors compete for prestige (by publishing books and essays), departments on the same campus compete for dwindling resources, admissions offices compete for applications, and everyone strives to beat peer institutions in theU.S. News &World Report rankings. The system has helped make research universities in the United States the best in the world (at research), the scientific side of them marking the great success story of the twentieth century.When it comes to pursuing undergraduate applicants, however, competition has had an entirely different result. Instead of pushing the campus toward more rigor, more excellence, competition has dragged the campus into more mediocrity, more complacency. The reason is simple. Instead of having to impress federal agencies and peer reviewers with the scientific and scholarly value of their products, campuses have had to impress eighteen-year-olds with the social and experiential value of their products. Colleges and universities need to expand the applicant pool, and so they must market the things that excite teenagers—not challenging teachers and high standards, but a state-of-the-art gym, lots of student choice in course work, tolerance and diversity, and loads of fun. If a school has a low average GPA, if it asks freshmen to write too many papers, if it has too many U.S. history, Western civ, and foreign language requirements...word gets around and high school seniors don’t apply. This is one reason why empirical instruments such as theNational Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Acad. Quest. (2011) 24:352–358 DOI 10.1007/s12129-011-9238-7